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How Many of Your Emails Does Google Have?

Benjamin Mako Hill does just that, but Google still has access to a shocking amount of his messages.

“For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work correspondence,” Hill wrote on his blog. “I do so to keep autonomy, control, and privacy over my email and so that no big company has copies of all of my personal email.”

Of course, running your own server doesn’t magically keep all of your emails hidden — if you respond to an email coming from a big tech company address, like a Gmail account, the company gets the message.

Hill wanted to see how much of his personal email Google had, so he wrote a program to analyze his email.

The results were astounding.

“Despite the fact that I spend hundreds of dollars a year and hours of work to host my own email server, Google has about half of my personal email!” he wrote. “Last year, Google delivered 57% of the emails in my inbox that I replied to.”